I've seen some posts regarding the Celtic Zodiac Animals floating around, with thirteen zodiac animals given to people based on when in the year they were born. I remember you said that there is extremely little people know for sure about old Celtic culture, and most pages I got on google came from non-trustworthy sites, so I wondered if you knew if this was an actual thing or not.
*sweats nervously* in short, nope.
There is a preconception, and it’s very popular in neo-Celtic and Celtic revivalist groups, that the Celts were somehow tied to nature and the animal world by a beautiful, spiritual bond. Images of Celtic women frolicking in the fields naked and covering themselves with flowers and communing with wolves and deer are all over the damn place. Wherever you look, there are multitudes of people talking about how ‘Celts didn’t perceive a separation between man and beast’, or how ‘the Celts used a tree calendar… they were masters of astrology!!’
It may be unsurprising to hear that both these things are bullshit.
Get these animals off my lawn
SO. Let’s tackle the Zodiac theory first and foremost. The ‘Zodiac animal’ theory, showing 13 animals and giving them a corresponding period in the year, was developed largely by Helena Paterson, in this book here.
(This is also a pretty good time to say this - just because a book is listed in the Mythology / Anthropology / Folklore section of Amazon, doesn’t mean it’s reliable!!)
Let’s see what else this Llewellyn Publications is responsible for, shall we?
Oh my. This whole Celtic Zodiac theory seems to have debunked itself, to be honest with you. I mean, when you’re putting ‘Celtic’ astrology on the same listicle as UFO and alien encounters, it must be super authentic, right? (PS there is actually a very very interesting theory about alien abduction and Celtic theories of the Otherworld - it’s unrelated to the astrology topic, but if you’re interested, you can find an article on it here!)
Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Most common notions of Celtic astrology are based on Robert Graves’ theory of a Tree calendar. Now, those of you who are familiar with Robert Graves might be thinking ‘but that famous Classicist dude doesn’t even go here!’ and you would be 100% right, because Graves does not go here. Unfortunately, he does linger outside the gates a lot, sighing irritably and wishing he had club membership. Graves had a real tendency to use things that he actually knew about - the Classics - to try and extrapolate theories about things he didn’t know about. This is a bit of a dangerous thing to do, because his reputation as an actual Classicist unfortunately lends credence to his bullshit about Celtic studies - and yes, it really is all bullshit.
Graves’ methodology was essentially to look at Celtic ideas, find a point of similarity with Classical ideas, and dig a huge hole into it until the two ideas were linked by some kind of dirt tunnel. Thanks to this methodology, we have his book The White Goddess to blame for his alarmingly popular theory about an Ancient Goddess, which caught on in a Very Big Way and makes studying the truth incredibly difficult, because his almost utopian ideas are often a little more intriguing than the facts. I’ve written more about that here, but in short, it’s not possible to use one culture as a template for another. You can’t fill in the blanks about one society by looking at another. Societies are not the same. Ideas are not necessarily transferable.
Anyway, without going into boring detail, Graves used the (unproven) idea that the Celtic alphabet was based on Greek and Latin, and reconstructed a ‘calendar’ from a battle image. There is a very thorough debunking of Graves’ ‘Tree calendar’ idea here, written by actual Celticist Peter Berresford-Ellis, which goes into detail about how he made it up - even asking a world-renowned Celticist whether or not his theory was possible, and ignoring him when he was told that it wasn’t. Nice.
To cut a (very) long story short, after Graves came a whole bunch of thoroughly wank zodiacs, one of which was Paterson’s - they’re all debunked very nicely here by Celticist Joseph Monard and iconographist Michel-Gérald Boutet, and summed up with the caustic ‘In this light, this book can only please the fringe romantics and the misinformed of the Neo-pagan, New-Age and Neo-druidical circles.’ Ouch.
The best idea that we actually have of any Celtic calendar is the Coligny calendar. Warning: it looks like this:
Not something that you’d want to hang up in your office. The calendar was found in Gaul (now France) and is written in Latin and Gaulish, dating from the 2nd century AD. The extent to which this calendar applied across the Celtic world is completely open to speculation; Ireland and Gaul are not exactly next-door neighbours, so it would be a bit specious to assume that they all followed the same calendar. That doesn’t mean that they didn’t, but it’s important to be aware that we’re dealing with conjecture here!
From this calendar, the structure of a five year cycle has been reconstructed - even though it looks like a shitty jigsaw puzzle that you’d give to your worst enemy, it has a repetitive pattern, so it’s been possible to reconstruct it on that basis. Monard, one of the authors of that previous article, has theorised a possible zodiac based on the Coligny calendar, which has the benefit of being based on, y’know, an actual calendar, which the other theories are not. His reconstruction is listed at the bottom of the article.
Beyond that, we don’t know. We don’t have a surviving Celtic zodiac, because not all of the writing of the time - the little that survives - has been translated, and most of it is from secondary or later sources. We don’t have anything that says ‘hey, if you were born in this year, then you’re a cat!’ or ‘if you were born under this type of moon, you’re a wolf!’ or even ‘if you were born on the sixth Saturday of the fifth month in the fourth year of the calendar, then you’re half snail and half antelope!’ - anything that claims to be the definitive ‘Celtic calendar / zodiac’ is lying through its teeth, because we don’t have a definitive Celtic calendar / zodiac.
One general rule of thumb when you’re looking at anything online that’s touted as ‘Celtic’ is to follow this handy checklist.
is it accompanied by any of the following terms or similar: ‘Celts were notoriously in tune with nature and basically grew dandelions out of their armpits’; ‘Celtic women were well-known as being free and unchained and basically spent all day frolicking naked in fields’; ‘Celts saw animals as people and were probably all vegan because they loved animals so much and gave them the vote’; ‘Celts were masters of the sky, and honestly, if spaceships had been invented back then, we’d be all the way to Pluto right now’?Anything that is supposedly ‘Celtic’ but reinforces the idea that Celts lived in total symbiosis with nature, had an egalitarian society, or were all amateur astronomers - that’s total wank, basically. It’s based on an idea that I quite like to term the ‘noble barbarian’, which actually relates to the Romans’ crush on the Celts and other ‘barbarian’ tribes, but really fits in with a lot of modern thinking about them as well. Essentially, modern Western people love to look back at any tribal society and say ‘gosh, look how naive and simple their lives were! How cute. They liked trees and everything. If only we could go back to that utopian age. War would cease to exist. Capitalism would die a death. Trump would never win. Those tribes really got it right’. Subsequently, the culture is turned into a cutesie bunnies-and-puppies simulacrum of its actuality. Indigenous tribes, particularly those of America, suffer from this Western fetishisation as well - look at any music festival. So, any Celtic, Native or otherwise tribal ‘calendar’ which is based on puppies and seahorses and the idea that people and animals were best buds and lived in fields of primroses together is probably wank. Soz.
does it claim to be ‘the Celtic zodiac’? Because that’s easily debunkable - there is no surviving Celtic zodiac, and everything is speculation. Easy peasy.
does it name the months after trees? It’s a Graves-type calendar, and it’s wank.
does it name the months after non-Celtic deities (e.g. Paterson’s names one of them after Persephone)? It’s based on interpretatio graeco / romana, the idea that Celtic culture was just lifted from a template of Classical culture, and it’s completely inaccurate. This methodology is a load of old cat poo. Celtic deities functioned differently to Classical deities, and they weren’t just carbon copies with Celtic names.
does it include animals that wouldn’t have been native to any Celtic region? I shouldn’t even have to say why this is a red flag, but I’ve seen some ‘Celtic zodiacs’ with lions as one of the months. No no no no. No. Please no.
I have to catch a bus now (I’m late oh no) but yes. No, basically.
Boutet, Michel-Gérald. “Celtic Astrology: A modern Hoax”
Ellis, Peter Berresford. “The Fabrication of ‘Celtic’ Astrology.”
Monard, Joseph (1996). About the Coligny Calendar.
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